Former President Donald Trump flew on a non-public jet with the president of the Heritage Basis, the far-right suppose tank behind Undertaking 2025, on his option to a convention the institute held in 2022, in keeping with a brand new report.
The Washington Submit obtained flight monitoring information and a photograph of Trump touring with Kevin Roberts in April 2022. The picture appears to additional undercut Trump’s claims that he has “no idea” who was accountable for the controversial conservative blueprint — though greater than 100 individuals who labored in his administration had a hand in producing it.
Roberts took over as president of the Heritage Basis in 2021 and was a key architect of Undertaking 2025, a 920-page doc with coverage goals that embrace changing federal workers with political appointees and eliminating the Division of Training.
“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump mentioned in a keynote speech at a Heritage Basis convention after the 2022 flight.
Roberts instructed the Submit in an interview final April that he had mentioned Undertaking 2025 with the previous president as a part of a briefing the Heritage Basis supplied to anybody hoping to win the White Home.
“I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025 because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me,” Roberts instructed the newspaper.
Trump, for his half, has continued to disclaim he had any data of the blueprint, and his spokesperson instructed the Submit that Roberts by no means briefed him. A Heritage spokesperson instructed the Submit that Trump appeared “uninterested” in what Roberts needed to say in the course of the flight.
Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has moved to distance himself from Undertaking 2025 amid fierce criticism from Democrats, and the Heritage Basis changed the director of the venture final month.
“Project 2025 has never and will never be an accurate reflection of President Trump’s policies,” the spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, instructed the publication. “As President Trump himself and our campaign leadership have repeatedly stated, President Trump’s 20 promises to the forgotten men and women and the [Republican Party] platform are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.”
Roberts additionally postponed the discharge of a brand new e-book this week, which features a foreword written by Trump’s operating mate, Sen. JD Vance, till after the November election.
The Democratic Get together rapidly pounced on the Submit’s report, calling Trump a “liar” and saying the picture confirms how the previous president and his operating mate “are fully connected to this dangerous plan to rip away our freedoms, threaten our democracy, and take our country backward.”
“While Trump and Vance desperately try to distance themselves from their own ultra-MAGA platform, voters are learning more and more about Project 2025’s wildly unpopular proposals every day ― and are ready to reject this extreme, far-right blueprint at the ballot box in November,” Alex Floyd, the Democratic Nationwide Committee’s fast response director, mentioned in an announcement.
